News

SHI announces new Editorial team

The editorial team has changed. After six years of strong growth and development under the leadership of Clive Seale and his fellow editors Sociology of Health & Illness has now moved to Wales. We are delighted to have the opportunity to take the Journal forward in these turbulent but exciting times for academic publishing, research and higher education. Members of the new team have strong connections to the medical sociology community in the UK and internationally, as well as to cognate areas in clinical medicine, nursing, public health, health services and health policy, medical anthropology, science studies and the social history of health and medicine. We also bring with us complementary areas of substantive and methodological expertise and each of us is engaged with policy and practitioner communities in our respective fields.

We think there is an important role for SHI in publishing papers which articulate an evidence-based, carefully reasoned and theoretically informed sociological response to what Clive Seale referred to as the intensely felt 'political and public issues that concern non-sociologists': those citizens, practitioners and policy makers who are often living and working in situations of considerable political pressure, social stress and institutional change. As well as developing the Journal's relevance to a range of audiences, we would also encourage a sense of engagement that often seems to be missing from academic responses to current public issues. This responsiveness to the changing world around academic work will also help to encourage methodological innovation and critical, interdisciplinary conversations.

Many people working in health and social care, and public health, across statutory and third sectors, are struggling to orientate themselves to a crisis in economy and society that will most definitely cast long shadows forward, even if it is difficult to predict exactly how long or how dark those shadows are likely to be. Sociological work drawing on international, comparative data and concepts will be very important in enabling sociologists and non-sociologists to orientate themselves imaginatively to potential new directions in analysis and interpretation, policy and social action. For similar reasons, we want to encourage the publication of sociological work that is historically-informed. This might include work that contains the analysis of historical documents or artefacts, and looks over time at changing population patterns, institutional frameworks and social experiences.

We are always living through times of change, but the current transformations in economy and society seem to be particularly intense: global economic uncertainties and their impacts on national sovereignties; the polarization and concentration of wealth and poverty between and within countries; the emergence of new economies and new forms and mixtures of governance and power; and the varying consequences for and responses from civil society, citizens, workers and communities. These developments have considerable implications for patterns and meanings of health and illness, for the experiences of being a patient in complex health systems, for professional roles and working lives, for the technologies of diagnosis and treatment and for the political economy of health and health care.

We will be building on the excellent work done by past editors and will be working closely with our editorial board, Trustees, publishers and international advisory editors in engaging in this important work. To emphasise what it says in our 'aims and scope': Sociology of Health & Illness is an international journal which publishes sociological articles on all aspects of health, illness, medicine and health care. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions that will advance our field.

Gareth Williams, Davina Allen, Eva Elliott, David Hughes, Joanna Latimer, Ian Rees Jones

Call for Abstracts for the 21st monograph
Children's Health and Well-being: policy debates and lived experience Editors: Geraldine Brady, Pam Lowe and Sonja Olin Lauritzen

AIDS conspiracy theories in the news

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2012.01480.x/abstract;jsessionid=D7C51ACCF413D16A89A71A77A230EA37.d01t01

SHI authors in the news

The UK Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail newspapers covered Carol Emslie's recent SHI article on middle aged drinking. See:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8949241/Middle-aged-drive-to-avoid-peer-pressure-of-drinking.html
See the original journal article here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2011.01424.x/abstract

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